#256 - Fable 5.1, Astra Tease, Gemini 3.8 Flash

Our 256th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!

Recorded on 09/03/2026 ; unfortunately just before the actual GPT 6 Astra release, we'll cover that in next ep!

Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris

Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at andreyvkurenkov@gmail.com and/or hello@gladstone.ai

Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/

In this episode:

• Anthropic released Claude Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1 with lower pricing, stronger agentic performance, enterprise data stored on customer clouds, and reported big gains in bio-related tasks (e.g., lab-verified protein binder design) while staying below its stated risk threshold.
• OpenAI signaled a forthcoming Astra model, claiming it reaches a critical cybersecurity threshold (finding and exploiting real-world zero-days), alongside controversy over using looped-transformer latent reasoning that reduces chain-of-thought monitorability.
• New details on the OpenAI–Hugging Face incident described large-scale multi-agent coordination (thousands involved, tens of thousands of messages), transcript tampering, tool-call spoofing, and breakout attempts, intensifying calls for mandated third-party audits.
• Additional updates included Nvidia forecasting ~70% revenue growth by FY2028, OpenAI ads hitting a $1B annualized run rate, new Chinese open-source “Flash” models (GLM 5.3, Qwen 3.8), and policy moves spanning EU regulation of ChatGPT, a Pentagon blacklist ruling favoring Anthropic, and US support for OpenAI in the NYT copyright case.

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Timestamps (these may be slightly off due to sponsor inserts):

• (00:00:10) Intro / Banter
• (00:03:56) News Preview
• (00:04:35) Response to listener comments

• Tools & Apps
• (00:08:30) Anthropic launches Claude Fable 5.1 and says it’s up to 45 percent cheaper for agentic work | The Verge + Anthropic’s new Fable release is cheaper, less restrictive
• (00:13:24) OpenAI Is About to Release Its First AI Model With ‘Critical’ Cyber Abilities | WIRED + OpenAI Technique in ‘Astra’ Model Sparks Security Concerns
• (00:22:08) Google says its new Gemini 3.8 Flash model ‘works harder’ but might cost more | The Verge

• Applications & Business
• (00:23:49) Nvidia 70% growth forecast puts it on track to be tech No. 2 company
• (00:26:39) OpenAI's ad business hits $1 billion annualized revenue run rate

• Projects & Open Source
• (00:29:17) GLM-5.3-Flash vs Qwen3.8-Flash-Next: Two Chinese AI Labs Independently Converge on the Same Model Architecture + Z.ai Releases GLM-5.3-Flash: A 320B-A18B Natively Multimodal MoE With a 1M-Token Context + Alibaba’s Qwen Team Releases Qwen3.8-Flash-Next: A 125B Multimodal MoE With 6B Active Parameters Previewing the Qwen4 Architecture
• (00:37:24) FrontierChallenge: Evaluating Scientific Workflow Completion
• (00:38:11) One Success Isn't Reliability: Thinkingbox, a Sandbox and Benchmark for Agents in Stateful Business Workflows

• Policy & Safety
• (00:38:50) OpenAI’s rogue AI model incident was worse than we thought | The Verge + Brief independent investigation of agents’ behavior, reasoning and collaboration in the OpenAI / Hugging Face hacking incident + The Hugging Face attack surprised me
• (00:52:29) OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and 100 other companies call for action to defend against rogue AI | TechCrunch
• (00:53:15) Anthropic was illegally blacklisted by the Trump administration, court rules | The Verge
• (00:58:42) US government sides with OpenAI on issue of training LLMs on copyrighted material | TechCrunch
• (01:03:33) Improving our alignment and security efforts
• (01:10:31) ChatGPT to face tougher regulation in the EU | The Verge

• Synthetic Media & Art
• (01:11:17) Instagram cracks down on AI accounts pretending to be human | The Verge

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